It is well known that various advertisements have been conventionally used as means for attracting customers to a store. Advertising may take a wide variety of forms, including an advertisement in a newspaper or magazine, an advertising circular for a newspaper, and an advertising display on a street. More recent developments include a system to display advertisements on a lighting message board called an electronic advertising display, and a system to display advertisements on a website for access from a personal computer or cellular phone equipped with the functions of a terminal.
In order to attract more customers, a commonly used approach is to offer a discount on goods or services available from a store. For this purpose, the store may issue discount coupons to its customers.
Such discount coupons may be printed on an advertisement in a newspaper or magazine or an advertising circular for a newspaper so that a customer can cut the coupon out for use. Other discount coupons may be distributed on the streets, while yet other discount coupons may be displayed as contents on a home web page for printing by the customer.
Another service has been made available to some customers, wherein a customer accesses a particular website through a cellular phone that is equipped with functions of a terminal, downloads data usable as a coupon from the website and presents the downloaded data to the store's salesclerk to receive a discount.
When a store announces through the various advertising means described above that its goods or services are made available at a higher discount than usual in order to increase customer demand, the store may issue numbered tickets to prevent any confusion created by an influx of too many customers into the store. In this case, the customers visit the store to receive their numbered tickets before they can obtain the goods or services in order of ticket number.
However, it is difficult for those who employ the known advertising approaches to assess the advertising effectiveness of issuing coupons. Even if effectiveness is analyzed, the resulting information may show only the number of coupons actually used. In addition, such an analysis is time-consuming, which may make it difficult to change the coupon discount according to the sales of goods.
If the coupon discount is changed by the store, of course, such a change cannot be announced to those customers who are not in the store. Nor can such a change contribute directly to increased effectiveness in attracting customers. Thus, it is substantially impossible for the current systems to provide immediate and dynamic advertising effectiveness.
When numbered tickets are issued, some of the customers who received them may not visit the store to purchase the goods or services. This may create disadvantages to both the store and the customers. For example, although the store may suffer unsold goods, there is no way for customers who have not received the numbered tickets to know of such unsold goods.
These coupons and numbered tickets are issued by the advertiser to the customers in a one-way manner. Thus, the advertiser cannot analyze the advertising effectiveness from the viewpoint of marketing, in order to determine what types of customers used the coupons and numbered tickets.
If the advertiser asks customers to fill in their coupons with information (name, address, age, occupation, etc.), useful feedback information on the advertisement can be obtained. However, this requires time and effort, which customers find very troublesome. Therefore, this approach is not necessarily effective.
Thus, there is a need for a privilege information issuing system and an electronic advertisement management method which allow both the users and issuers to exploit useful ticket information, privilege information, and additional information for coupons and numbered tickets.